Panel GUI

[Jim Pick <jim jimpick com>]

I've been playing around with the latest panel, and I'm really
starting to like it.

Here are some requests:

 * Menus

   - The right-click menus are somewhat hazardous to use.  The item
     under the mouse is selected when the mouse button is released.
     If you decide not to do something, you have to consciously
     move the mouse off of the menu.  That's not intuitive.

   - The menu that pops up when clicking on the background of the
     panel should be the same one as the "Panel" menu in the top
     menu level.

   - The menus should grab the mouse, so that when you click off the
     menu, they disappear.

   - When the panel is on the right side of the screen, it would be
     nice if the arrows for the submenus pointed to the left.

   - When using autohide, the panel should hide itself until the
     menu is closed.

 * Saving and exiting

   - There should be a "Save" menu entry for saving the state of the
     panel.  Otherwise, the only way to do it is to close down the
     panel, and reload it.

   - "Log out" should really be "Close down panel"

 * Installing

   - I'd like it if the installation Makefile would set the "Exec"
     entries in the .desktop files to include the full path
     (ie. add on $bindir).  I've got multiple versions of Gnome
     on my machine.

 * Customizing

   - When adding a new applet to the panel, it would be nice if it
     would appear in a blank space, rather than rearranging the
     rest of the applets.

   - I'd like to be able to add text icons, pixmap icons, or icons
     with both.  Down the road, it would be cool to have a pixmap
     editor based on the Gimp - with Net-Fu style "canned" scripts.

   - A nice pixmap browser/selector would be cool.

   - I'd like to have panel to have two modes - design time and
     run time.  That way, it would be locked in normal use, so
     it would be hard to accidentally move or remove applets.

 * Components  (down the road)

   - I'd like to see the whole panel concept be an application
     that sat inside a Gnome container app.  That way, there
     could be multiple panels.  In turn, the panel itself would
     just be a container.

     ie.  I might have a "window edge" container app in which
     I can embed multiple panels.  There might one panel on the
     top of the screen, and two auto-hide ones on the right.
     A panel could have a fixed size so it wouldn't take up
     an entire side of the screen.  The container app might
     have some support for scripting too.

     Other container apps would be able to embed the panel too,
     so the panel could be used inside the borders of the
     client application.  That would be cool with the auto-hide
     feature.

Anyways, I've got more ideas ... but that's a start.  I'd be
willing to work on some of these specific items if nobody else
is already working on 'em.  Keep in mind that I'm a bit
slow to get things done.

I hope somebody is reading this list.  :-)

Cheers,

 - Jim

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